Does xxxx specify a file nameor directory name on the target(F = file, D = directory)?

I'd like to see what the prompt looks like in other languages.

Sometimes I would like to write code to derive the correct responses for a prompt in an agnostic way, and having a list of messages in different languages would help determine if there are patterns I can rely on to help parse the needed values.

... is what I get back for your XCOPY example. So you could parse the bracket term and assume the first pair is for "file" and the second pair for "directory".Probably you have to execute an example using the ctrl+c technique beforehand.

Thanks aGerman. I already knew the German letters, but it is good to see that the message is formatted the same.

No Ctrl-C is needed. You can simply redirect input to NUL to capture the output without fear of actually copying anything. It successfully fails after two iterations. (What do you think of that oxymoron )

dbenham wrote:Does anyone know of a resource that lists standard command prompts and messages for various languages

Don't know that such a list exists (not to mention that some texts have changed between versions). And I think it would be a mighty brave endeavor to compile one, but if anyone volunteers then the strings themselves are all in *.mui files under %systemRoot%\system32\<language-code> (since Vista), for example system32\en-us\cmd.exe.mui, help.exe.mui etc. They can be viewed with sysinternals' strings.exe (or extracted with a binary resource editor). One could conceivably install additional language packs and examine strings in other languages. or ask faraway friends to collect the strings.exe output in different languages. But I am not aware of a way to do this in any automated/easy fashion.

Yes I also thought about MUI files but I wasn't able to find any reference about their structure. They are PE files (like exe or dll) but I don't know how to find the entry points and how they are linked to the related executable. Thus, you could read all the plain text strings but you won't find out where they belong to or in what order they would be displayed. Furthermore there still seem to be other techniques to make executable files multilingual. I wasn't able to find the related mui file for xcopy.exe for example...

The MUI extension and the <language-code> subdirectories (like 'en-us') are a convention introduced in Vista (see for example http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/goglobal/cc442492.aspx#MUI), with some support built into Windows (GetFileMUIPath and other APIs). However, the technique itself of isolating the "localized" strings into separate per-language resource-only DLLs has been used forever.

One can match strings between languages based on their numeric resource ID. For an example, looking into the en-US\ULIB.DLL.MUI message table (which holds the strings for a number of file utilities including XCOPY) using http://www.angusj.com/resourcehacker/